Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Debian Fonts and Foxe's Book of Martyrs

A couple of weeks ago I dropped by a favorite Web site, and was redirected to it's updated version: Welcome to the second edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition Online (version 1.1 - summer 2006). I only have an abridged edition of Foxe here at the house, and it's not on the shelf at the Pocahontas County Free Libraries, so it's clear why I need the online edition. This new version of Foxe's Book of Martyrs uses Unicode character coding, and this was a problem for me. For some reason, the last few times I've installed the "Desktop" set of programs for Debian Stable (that's my current favorite Linux flavor), the defoma packages have failed to install. Everything still worked, but I wasn't seeing all the different fonts and non-Roman characters on the Web.

Not being able to display the second edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs was the inconvenience that pushed me into fixing the font situation. It wasn't too difficult, and here are the references I used. Debian Font Configuration gave step-by-step directions which worked on the first try for me.

2 comments:

Larry said...

Hi, Rebecca! I've been getting caught up on your recent posts. Your recent comment at my blog revealed you to be another John D. MacDonald fan... now I want to re-read the McGee series!

So Defoma (or the lack of the package) might be the source of the small but annoying font problem in my Debian installation! Thanks for the tip!

Rebecca Clayton said...

Hope it helped. One thing that always helps me is a Ft. Lauderdale vacation with Travis McGee.